Oh, Lord, I can forgive what’s done to me by them,
But better, a wild hawk, I would tear a lamb,
Or, a snake — sting the sleeping in the grasses,
Than to be man, and see what people masses
Do on the earth, and through the noxious shame
To not dare up my eyes to heavens’ pure flame.
О Боже, за себя я все могу простить,
Но лучше б ястребом ягненка мне когтить
Или змеей уснувших жалить в поле,
Чем человеком быть и видеть поневоле,
Что люди делают, и сквозь тлетворный срам
Не сметь поднять глаза к высоким небесам.
«Brethren, let’s praise the dusk of freedom / With its great year of twilit gloom, / Its hefty grove of dangling snares / Cast into the night’s jet-black waters! / From under a deaf age’s yoke / You rise, O sun! O judge! O folk! And let us praise the fatal burden / Taken up in tear...»
«Whoever kisses time’s ancient nodding head / will remember later, like a loving son, / how the old man lay down to sleep / in the drift of wheat outside the window. / He who has opened the eyes of the age, / two large sleepy apples with inflamed lids, / hears forever after the roar of ...»
«He who has kissed time on its tormented temple / With filial tenderness will subsequently / Recollect how time took to its bed in a snowbank / The color of wheat beyond the window. / He who had raised the century’s inflamed eyelids — / Two giant apples swollen with sleep — / Will c...»
«Skyscrapers, and the sky below, / It nears the earth in misty layers. / The same covert and secret woe / Persists in vast and happy Paris. The evening boulevards are loud, / The sunset’s final glimmer dies. / And there are couples all around, / And trembling lips and daring eyes. I...»